 "How a risk-averse BJP lost Delhi")
Within days of projecting her as its chief ministerial candidate, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had come to dread any public event where Kiran Bedi was to speak. It wasn't her sore throat, but instructions from a top party leader that she shouldn't talk frequently to the media or give long speeches at public rallies.
There are many in the BJP blaming Bedi for the party’s defeat. But the decision to prop up Bedi as its CM candidate was only the last straw in a series of missteps by those planning BJP’s Delhi poll campaign. The BJP strategy in Delhi played it 'safe’, whereas all of BJP’s recent electoral victories had come on the back of an aggressive campaign and risk taking – it even broke with old alliance partners in both Haryana and Maharashtra.
One such aggressive decision could have been to have Bedi lock horns with Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal on the New Delhi seat. This would have tied Kejriwal down to his constituency. Bedi, according to sources, had agreed to challenge her former comrade. But the BJP leadership felt it was better they field her from the ‘safe seat’ of Krishna Nagar.
Bedi had initially wanted to contest from Greater Kailash, but the leadership didn’t want her to contest against President Pranab Mukehrjee’s daughter Sharmishtha Mukherjee, and instead gave the party ticket to a relatively lightweight candidate.
Krishna Nagar seat is the pocket borough of union science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan, the BJP chief ministerial candidate for the 2013 polls. He wasn’t consulted, and was instead handed a fait accompli that he must help Bedi win a seat that the well-known doctor has never lost since 1993.
It was the second insult to Harsh Vardhan in less than three months. In November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi moved him out of the high profile health ministry to the science and technology ministry. The minister was reportedly far from happy.
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Bedi was parachuted in at the last minute, without the necessary grooming, to save a sinking ship. The rot had started months before, however, when the central leadership favoured delaying the election and appointed Satish Upadhyay as the Delhi unit chief.
It was yet another example of ‘safety first’ approach. The party didn’t want to face another election. The new state unit leadership was tasked with mustering enough numbers to form a government by engineering defections and resignations in AAP. BJP’s opponents were wise to the strategy, and recorded a senior BJP leader trying to influence an AAP MLA.
Further embarrassment followed when PM Narendra Modi’s ‘Swachch Bharat campaign’ faced public embarrassment. Modi had started the ‘Clean India’ campaign from a Valmiki locality in October, with an eye of the significant Dalit votes in Delhi.
A month later, Upadhyaya and AAP discard Shazia Ilmi went about sweeping a road in the heart of Delhi, but camerapersons captured in detail how garbage was deliberately strewn on the street an hour before these VIPs landed on the scene. The BJP’s Dalit outreach could never really take off, with BJP President Amit Shah addressing poorly attended Dalit rallies in Talkatora Stadium in December and January.
Kejriwal’s attacks on Upadhyaya further queered the pitch for the party, forcing top leaders to seek Bedi’s help. The ‘masterstroke’ boomeranged. The former IPS officer was utterly underequipped to handle the pressures of a political fight. Party leaders even appointed minders for her, who complained that she barely listened to them.
Bedi surrounded herself with her women friends and relatives, including her daughter and sister. “She would rarely listen to our advice or would change plans after discussions with her coterie which had zero political experience,” complain those involved with election strategy. One of her minders not only quit but made a public spectacle of it. According to an insider, Bedi even had a meeting with the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid. Her aides saved the day by stopping her from tweeting how the Imam had promised BJP his support.
Bedi also couldn’t help but be her feisty self. She told a jat gathering at her public rally in Najafgarh how they better not kill their daughters, educate them and even allow them to take up jobs. The all- male gathering thought Bedi had insulted them and complained to local BJP leaders.
Bedi, at at least three of her public meetings, told her rural audience that she didn’t care if they voted for BJP but they dare not mistreat their daughters and womenfolk. Her intent was noble but her “straight talk” upset people.
Her media advisors, seasoned BJP workers, compounded the problem by their whimsical handling of the media. They blackballed a widely circulated Hindi newspaper whose editor is a BJP MP from Haryana, and refused interviews to an influential local television news channel. Bedi once made a well-known Hindi news anchor wait for two hours, before telling him that she only had ten minutes for an interview that had been planned much in advance.
The chickens, it seems, have now finally come home to roost.